Cinema's Valuable Flops

Historic successes and colossal failure are often fueled by the same impulses: ambition, audacity, passion, and a burning desire to comment meaningfully on the world around us.

14 November, 2010

An era’s great flops serve countless functions in pushing the art and industry of filmmaking forward. They introduce technological innovations. They help filmmakers and actors — those that manage to work again, at least — learn how to maximize their strengths and minimize their weaknesses. And for the people involved in them, flops are something more than a wake-up call: They can even rescue a career. Historic successes and colossal failure are often fueled by the same impulses: ambition, audacity, passion, and a burning desire to comment meaningfully on the world around us.